Thursday, March 26, 2009

Agenda: Week 9

1. Grand Theft Audio



See complete article at Computers and Composition Online (Special Issue on Media Convergence, Spring 2008), Danielle Devoss and Suzanne Webb, Michigan State University

2. Justin Cone's "Building on the Past" (manifesto for CC)





Bound By Law

3. Creative Commons

4. Now what? Gathering Media for your final projects. 

What are your options? What are your plans?

Notes from Bound By Law


Copyright doesn’t protect ideas, only specific expressions of ideas

The constitutional goal of copyright is to encourage people to make and distribute new works. (ARTICLE I, SECTION 8, CLAUSE 8)

To do so, copyright law gives authors, including filmmakers, the exclusive right to make copies make adaptive translations, publicly distribute, publically display, and publically perform (29)

. . .
So copyright gives you rights that you can use to control and get paid for your work. At its best, it produces a brilliant decentralized system of creativity.
Artists sometimes think they want to have as much copyright protection as possible. Well, this may be great on the output side; but what about the input side?
If everything is protected by copyright, then were do you go to get your raw materials?
Copyright law also tries to give artists access to the raw materials they need to create in the first place (32)

“Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Cretivity is impossible without a rich public domain. . . overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion ,each new creator building on the words of those who came before” (Judge Alex Kozinski, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, qtd on 33).

The bottom line: page 34 (check it out!)

On Fair Use: 35-44
Fair use is one way copyright law mediates between the need to give incentives to creators and the need to use content to create and comment on the world. (44)
Term limits are another.

Term limits: 44-
The ever-lengthening copyright term seems to be having the opposite effect frofrom what the consitution intended. It hinders artists who want to use older works, even when the copyright owner can’t be found or wouldn’t care. The longer term also puts more pressure on fair use (44-46).

Trademarks: 47- 49
While copyright law protects artistic works, trademark law protects brand names and logos that tell consumers where products come from (47).

. . . to infringe a trademark, you would generally have to use it in a way that confuses consumers (48).

People who appear in documentary: 50-51

“What about getting permission from people who appear in the documentary? Permission is normally required—privacy is a legitimate claim. But there is an impotant first amendment exception that lets you show people involved in matters of public interest, without permission (50).

Errors and Omissions Insurance: 52-54
To show your film to a broader public through conventional distribution channel—like HBO or PBS—you need E&O insurance to cover possible lawsuits . . . and E&O Insurance is only required to get access to conventional distribution channels. Not with the internet and alternative methods of distribution, filmmakers can reach a broad audience without getting insurance. (52, 54).

Cease and Desist letters (55)
Without or without insurance, sometimes people get scared of using stuff that they have the perfect right to use. . . . If you receive one of these letters, you should go to www.chillingeffects.org for helpfl info.

Fair Use—Use It Or Lose it! (59)

From the Afterword (67)
The [copyright] system appears to have gone astray, to have lost sight of its original goal (67)
The flourishing of digital media has been seen by policymakers mainly as a thread—as the rise of a ‘pirate culture of lawlessness.’ That threat is real. But what is missing is a corresponding opportunity.

Copyright is not an end in itself. It is a tool to promote the creation and distribution of knowledge and culture. (68)

Best Practices Statement: Center for Social Media at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org

Creative Commons “builds upon the ‘all rights reserved’ of traditional copyright to create a voluntary ‘some rights reserved’ copyright. It is a nonprofit and all of the tools are free.” (Boyles 72). (www.creativecommons.org)

Monday, March 23, 2009

Week 9 Readings


Bound by Law: Tales from the Public Domain. Duke Law, Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

"Get Creative." Creative Commons Web site

Read more about Creative Commons at www.creativecommons.org

Get started on Lessing's Free Culture
We'll start discussing this Week 10.

Friday, March 20, 2009

CFW available (tell your students!)

Call for Webtexts: Kairos Special Issue (Summer 2011; Proposals Due October 1, 2009)

Guest Editors: Shannon Carter, Texas A&M-Commerce and Bump Halbritter, Michigan State University

The Summer 2011 special issue of Kairos entitled (Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric will bring together digital scholarship produced by undergraduates composing with new media. This special issue invites undergraduates and their instructors to join the scholarly conversation in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies through their own digital contributions.

For more information, please visit the complete call for webtexts or contact the Guest Editors, Shannon Carter (Shannon_Carter@tamu-commerce.edu) or Bump Halbritter (drbump@msu.edu).

Proposals are due by October 1, 2009.

Lost Generation (inspiration)

Worth viewing

"This video was created for the AARP U@50 video contest and placed second"


Thursday, March 19, 2009

Monday, March 16, 2009

Remix Extraordinaire

A fascinating remix. Story from today's All Things Considered--and a video--at 

"The latest viral video doesn't just come from YouTube — it's a remix of it. Amateur musicians with video cameras and homemade gadgets are all the playthings of an Israel-based musician and producer named Kutiman, who blends their sounds and images into unique songs. . . "

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

screen capturing tools (free[ish]!)

Wanna record a screenshot or capture video of something you can play on your desktop . . . or even create a video of something you are doing on your desktop (like my typing of this message)?

For Mac, try Capture Me (free!): http://www.download.com/Capture-Me/3000-2192_4-10302571.html

For PC, try Snag It (free trial): http://www.download.com/Snagit/3000-2192_4-10004813.html

For Mac or PC, try Jing. I've not played with this one, but it looks great! Free, too. It's at http://www.jingproject.com/

Enjoy!

Kairos Special Issue (Call for Webtexts as genre)

As I mentioned last time, I will be guesting editing (with Bump Halbritter) a special issue of the Kairos publishing digital scholarship produced by undergraduates across the country.

Cheryl Ball, the journal's editor, asked her undergraduate students to "remediate" the call for webtexts into video cfps. The first drafts are below.

I've offered some feedback already, which I'll post via "comments" below. She's sharing that with the students now. But I KNOW they'd really welcome/value your feedback as well. Share that here and I'll share that with her and the students.

If you can get that feedback to us within the next week,that'd be great. Cheryl is hoping to share these during the week of 4Cs, which may not be possible. But we remain hopeful.

The text-based CFW is below, as well as the original proposal.

Thanks!











Proposal
(Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric
Special Issue, Summer 2011

Guest Editors:

Shannon Carter, Texas A&M-Commerce
Bump Halbritter, Michigan State University

Summary
We propose a special issue devoted to digital scholarship composed by undergraduates. We know a lot of exciting work is being done in this area, and we wish to provide a venue for these important multimodal texts. Moreover, this special issue will celebrate the collaborative nature of student scholarship generated within the context of instruction. Thus, we invite significant contributions from the student author’s collaborating instructor.

Call for Webtexts
For years, the print-based, peer-reviewed journal Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric (YSW) has been publishing top-notch scholarship created by the country's undergraduates. For undergraduates creating multimodal scholarship on the subject, however, no such dedicated venue yet exists.

Until now.

With the 2011 special issue of Kairos tentatively entitled (Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric, we will bring together digital scholarship produced by undergraduates composing with new media. We know such work is plentiful. We’ve seen it—at campus-wide celebrations, at area conferences, in our classrooms, in your classrooms. We’ve found it in in-house publishing venues resulting in local circulation and even nationally, published alongside some of the most established scholars in our field.

Circulation like this is important. It is how such work gets started, celebrated, mined, and seeded into new classrooms, programs, and approaches to composition.

Given this important work, the time is right to bring these exciting projects together, highlighting the fabulous work that’s possible amongst our undergraduates working with new media.

In other words,

Building on the tradition of the successful print-based journal Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric and the Kairos tradition of publishing cutting-edge, multimodal scholarship, this special issue invites undergraduates and their instructors to join the scholarly conversation in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies through their own digital contributions.

The subject of this multimodal work will address rhetoric, 
technology, pedagogy, and composition studies--the same scope 
published in the recurring issues of Kairos. The limits of what counts as scholarship will be drawn no more tightly than they are 
around Kairos submissions more generally. We want to publish 
projects that are intellectually rigorous, engaging, and important. 
Due to our experiences in working with multimediated texts, we come to this collection with some expectations for what such scholarship
will look and sound like; however, we remain open to consider submissions that challenge these preconceptions as well. We are hopeful that these submissions will expand the field’s understandings of "digital scholarship" and “writing instruction”—both in content and in form. We are certain they will.

We are also hopeful that this issue will promote further integration of new media in the undergraduate curriculum by sharing exemplar examples of student work and offering the tools for instructors interested in assigning and supporting this kind of work

(Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric is calling for three types of submissions that will make use of four recurring features of Kairos: Topoi, Inventio, Praxis, and Reviews. The primary difference between Topoi/Praxis and Praxis/Inventio submissions is how tightly the topic of the student text adheres to the topics of rhetoric, pedagogy, technology, writing, new media, and other topics Kairos typically publishes. Student texts that fall outside of usual Kairos topics will include an additional student-authored Inventio component.

1) Topoi/Praxis submissions: collaboratively-authored webtext comprised of the following two subsections: a) student-authored Topoi webtexts on issues tightly related to rhetoric, pedagogy, technology, writing, new media, and other topics Kairos typically publishes, and b) a teacher-authored Praxis webtext that situates the student’s work within the pedagogical aims of the assignment that invited the student’s work. Student-authored Topoi texts should be mediated as appropriate, and may include, but are not limited to, any combination of text, hypertext, images, digital video, and/or sound.
Instructor-authored Praxis texts should articulate the instructional context that shaped the text (assignment, course, learning objectives, revision/feedback structure, institutional infrastructure). In other words, the instructor-generated Praxis text should complement the student Topoi submission by providing the context from which the multimodal project emerged, but the undergraduates remain the stars of this feature so the Praxis texts needn’t be more significant than a description of the assignment itself and a brief discussion of other relevant context.

2) Praxis/Inventio submissions: collaboratively-authored webtext comprised of the following three subsections: a) a student-authored, multimedia text of any topic or genre (in other words, texts not tightly related to topics Kairos typically publishes), b) a teacher-authored Praxis webtext that situates the student’s work within the pedagogical aims of the assignment that invited the student’s work, and c) a student-authored Inventio webtext that discusses the rhetorical decisions, contexts, influences, and material resources that directed the production of the multimedia work submitted (see “a” above).

All media included in either type of submission (Topoi/Praxis or Praxis/Inventio) must have copyright clearance for publication. Please see Kairos’ policy on Copyright (http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/submissions.html#copy)

If you have any concerns about copyright, contact the guest editors. We welcome any chance to help potential authors work through these issues.

3) Reviews: In addition to the above multimodal contributions, we invite reviews (by students or by whole classes) of student-produced work that is circulating outside of the academy or maybe a few local sites that are in use at specific institutions (so, student-produced reviews of student-produced digital work), or the like. What sorts of multimodal work are students composing outside of the academy? Inside the academy? Review it for us and let us publish it in this special issue of Kairos. Please see “Reviews” at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/reviews.html for examples of previously published reviews.

Instructors and the student authors with whom they are collaborating are encouraged to contact the special issue editorial staff early in their project’s development.

All authors/co-authors accepted to the issue will be invited to submit Review and/or Disputatio multimedia and/or webtexts in response to the work of their special issue peers for possible publication in a subsequent issue of Kairos.

Proposal Guidelines

Proposals should be submitted in a single word-processing document and sent to the two guest editors below. The proposal should include

• Author name(s) and full contact information
• Section for which the proposal should be considered (Topoi/Praxis, Praxis/Inventio, or Reviews). If you are unsure, just ask! We’ll be happy to help you find the best place for this submission. See Kairos’ submission information with section descriptions here: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/submissions.html
• Statement from instructor regarding the context, assignment, and/or course from which the proposed project emerged/will emerge. If this is unavailable, student may submit a note stating that he/she was an undergraduate when he/she first composed this piece.
• One-page description of what you wish to develop for this special issue, including information about how far you are in the process and what you will need to develop the project you propose.

You are welcome to include a prototype (i.e., sample URL, screenshots, audio or video excerpt, etc) to accompany your design description. We cannot accept attachments over 2 megs via email. If your submission is larger than that, email us at least a week prior to the submission deadline so we can suggest alternative modes of delivery. Prototypes are not required, however, so please don’t feel you must be that far along with a project to consider submitting it. A proposal is all that is required.

Email submissions to guest editors at:

• Shannon Carter, Shannon_Carter@tamu-commerce.edu
• Bump Halbritter, drbump@msu.edu

Timeline

July 2009: CFW for the special issue goes out


October 2009: Webtext proposal deadline

November 2009: Guest Editor notifies authors of accepted webtexts,
 invited to submit works in progress to Faculty Advising Editors and/or to the sandbox for peer review (FAEs drawn from submitting faculty)


February 2010: Full webtexts due, reviewed internally


March/April/May 2010: webtexts reviewed externally


June 2010: authors notified of submission status


August 2010: final webtexts received from authors, copyediting review,
etc.


January 2011: final webtext to editors (from guest editors) for queries and proofing

May 2011: issue goes live

Kairos Special Issue
(Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric

Summer 2011

Invitation to Instructors--

Are your undergraduate students writing with new media? Are your students reviewing multimodal compositions created elsewhere? What are you doing to invite and support this good work? Do your exemplar student authors need a venue in which to share their digital work?

We invite undergraduate scholars to share their original, multimodal projects with Kairos readers for a special issue tentatively entitled (Re)medating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric (Summer 2011).

If your undergraduates are producing multimodal texts on topics tightly related to rhetoric, pedagogy, technology, writing, literacy, new media, and other topics Kairos typically publishes, we invite them to submit to our Topoi section.

If your students are creating strong multimodal texts on other topics, we invite them for our Praxis/Inventio feature. Texts submitted for this feature should include a reflective piece (Inventio) that accompanies the main project submitted, offering a behind-the-scenes account of the creator’s rhetorical choices and experiences in producing this multimodal text. The Inventio text will help tie these topics to issues in rhetoric, pedagogy, technology, writing, literacy, and/or new media (as per Kairos’s mission).

For both the Inventio and the Topoi submissions, we invite instructors to submit a short essay (“Praxis”) that describes the context from which these exemplar texts emerged: assignment, course goals, revision/feedback structure, and/or other relevant items.

For this issue, the undergraduates are the stars. However, we believe that excellent work happens most readily when we are able to provide a strong infrastructure for such work. Thus, we would like for this issue to provide instructor voices in combination with these top student authors. Doing so will help facilitate the successful integration of new media into a greater number of classrooms.

Reviews: We also invite student reviews (by undergraduate students or whole classes) of student-produced work that is circulating outside the academy or maybe a few local sites that are in use at specific institutions (student-produced reviews of student-produced digital work).

For details on the Praxis, Inventio, or Reviews sections of this special issue, please see the Call for Webtexts.

If you will be inviting your students to submit, please let us know as early as possible (by Summer 2009, if you can). We wish to invite all participating instructors to serve as reviewers and hope that once accepted texts have been selected those interested in this project will remain on board to serve as “Faculty Advising Editors” (FAEs), supporting these student authors as they ready their texts for publication in the Summer 2011 issue of Kairos.

Of course, all reviewers and FAE’s will be publically acknowledged in this special issue.


¬¬¬¬¬¬
Invitation to Student Authors—

Are you an undergraduate student producing innovative, multimodal texts worth sharing with a larger audience?

Are you writing with video? audio? images? A combination of all of these modalities? What have you learned about writing, technology, literacy, rhetoric, and/or new media as a result of this work?

Share your work with an international audience!

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and Technology invites undergraduates to submit multimodal texts that originated in one our more college courses. Exemplar projects will be published in the special issue tentatively entitled (Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric.

If your digital text (video/audio/images) covers a topic tightly related to rhetoric, pedagogy, technology, writing, literacy, new media, and other topics Kairos typically publishes, we invite you to submit to our Topoi section.

If your digital text covers a topic other than those Kairos typically publishes (see above), we invite those too! Submit these for the Praxis/Inventio feature and add a reflective offering a behind-the-scenes account of your rhetorical choices and experiences in producing this multimodal text.

If you are interested in reviewing student-produced digital work (work circulating outside the academy or within), we invite those for our Reviews section. We are looking for student-produced reviews of student-produced digital work. What sorts of multimodal work are undergraduates composing outside of the academy? Inside the academy? Review it for us and let us publish it in this special issue of Kairos.

Your instructor will be invited to work closely with you throughout the process, likely submitting a companion text that provides the assignment and other details that invited and supported the creation of your digital text.

See Call for Webtexts for details.

Deadlines and other important dates:
October 2009: Proposals Due (see “proposal guidelines” on the CFW for details)
November 2009: Authors notified of accepted webtexts
February 2010: Full webtext due
March/April/May 2010: full webtexts reviewed (internally, then externally)
June 2010: authors notified of submission status
August 2010: final webtexts/revisions due
May 2011: Issue goes live!

Week 8 Agenda (+ project deadlines)

Week 8 Agenda: Studio Time

During Week 8, I will be in San Francisco for CCCC (the big conference in my field).  Since you guys have lots to do, I'd like to hold class anyway--providing necessary studio time and a good support network in Sylwester, Luca, and Angela (not to mention the rest of you smart folks!). 

Here's what I want you to do before/during class that day:

1. Blog about our readings for Week 9 (MC's Griffin, Selfe, and Cooper). DUE 3/12

2. Blog about your plans for the final project. Use the questions on page 34 (MC) as guide. I'm talking about Figure 3.2. You'll have to adapt the tense to your future project rather than your ongoing one, but I think you can handle it! ;) DUE 3/12

3. If you've not yet shared your audio project with me (three of you haven't), ready that for me by burning it to a CD and/or sharing it via your blog. If you have questions/concerns about how, let me know. And/or take advantage of the CLiC space in the Library, where you can find Luca and Sylwester from 10-2 TWR each week. DUE 3/12

4. If you've not yet shared a video project (just a rough/short one is required at this point), ready that for me by uploading it to YouTube and/or Google Video and embedding it in your blog. If this is a draft of/portion of your final project for this class, you can identify it as that by adding "rough draft" or "incomplete" to the video description when you upload it to Google Video and/or YouTube and you can repeat that information in the blog posting itself.  Email me when that's ready. DUE 3/12

5. If you've already shared a bit of audio and video with me, then you are all caught up. Save your new video project: the "video sentence." 

Have you shared a "video sentence" or two yet? (see last week's assignment). If not, finish that up and share it today. DUE 3/12

If you have, then consider preparing a "video sentence" or two for your current project. If you captured video throughout the week for just that purpose, download it, label the parts of speech represented (noun, verb, adjective/adverb), and begin developing a new sentence or two. 

Be great if you could ready these to share before we meet again after Spring Break (3/26)

Any questions or concerns? Let me know! 

Week 7 Agenda

1. Share remaining videos (If you've not already uploaded your video to Google Video or YouTube and embedded it in your blog, do so before the end of class next week).

A couple of you have not had a chance to share your audio yet. As we are still awaiting server space, please just burn the audio to a CD (label it!) and hand it in that way. See "project deadlines" post for more about what's due and when/why/how.

2. Other items of note available at your blogs?

3. Discuss Watkins (Kairos video, "Words are the Ultimate Abstraction"), Barton and Huot (MC), Alexander (MC), Church and Powell (MC), Journet et. al (http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Digital_Mirrors/) [especially "In Medias Response" at http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Digital_Mirrors/ryan_trauman_home_01.htm ] , and "Writing with Video--Art 199" (in campus news and the interviews with former students and rubric for grading video projects and current home for "Writing with Video" at UIUC)

3. Capture video in groups of 3-4. Spend no more than 45 minutes wondering campus (or elsewhere!) and capturing 10-15 second clips of "texts" in the world (on campus or elsewhere). Try not to develop any theme yet. Think broadly about what's worth capturing. Be silly. Be observant. Think creatively. What do you see, hear, and experience in your walk about your chosen location? Project adapted from http://writingwithvideo.net/module01.htm.

4. When you return, transfer the footage as separate clips to your desktop. "After reviewing each clip, name the clip using one of the grammatical terms above (noun, verb, adjective/adverb)."

Import these clips into a MovieMaker project file. "Then create at least [one] 'video sentences' using your collection. Each sentence should use between 3 and 9 clips. No one sentence should be longer than thirty seconds.

"These pieces can be fun, serious, literal, straightforward, or mysterious. It is required, however, that you have a good time in the process. . . .

"Purpose: Become comfortable using a camcorder; develop a habit of always looking and listening--paying attention--to what's going on around you; get some experience using [MovieMaker], start thinking of video as a language; experience how editing (choosing content, sequence, and pacing) creates interest and meaning."

5. Upload to YouTube or Google Video, embed in your blog, and SHARE!

6. Consider borrowing a Flipcamera for the week and capturing short video clips relevant to your final project. In class next time, create 2-3 additional "video sentences" that you can use directly in/for your final project.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Web 2.0

After viewing Wesch's work (especially "The Machine is Us/ing Us"), it seems like a good idea to begin bringing in some additional words/ideas/examples of Web 2.0 culture.

Social Networking in Plain English




Social Media in Plain English



RSS in Plain English



Wikis in Plain English




Twitter in Plain English

What about Twitter? "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" (from http://twitter.com/)



Just a start. So many others, including Facebook, MySpace, Live Journal, etc.